Maggie Gyllenhaal
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Margalit Ruth "Maggie" Gyllenhaal is an American actress. She is the daughter of filmmakers Stephen Gyllenhaal and Naomi Achs and the older sister of actor Jake Gyllenhaal. She began her film career as a teenager with roles in her father's films and appeared alongside her brother in the psychological horror film Donnie Darko. She garnered critical praise for starring as Lee Holloway in Secretary, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. For her performance in Sherrybaby, she...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actress
Date of Birth16 November 1977
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I'm still trying to figure out what the right line is between myself and the people I play. Sometimes I go too far one way or too far the other.
Some people would say you need what you need to work, but I need very little to work, because I learned how to make movies on tiny movies. It's all kind of easy for me.
I would like to do a big movie that many, many people see but I just know I would be miserable if it didn't have something to it.
I don't see that many movies lately that are actually about something, that are trying to challenge something about the way that people interact.
I don't feel that way now. I don't want to make movies for the 10 people who feel exactly the same way about the world that I do. I want to make movies that many, many people see, and I want to say something that I believe is important in a way that people who don't agree with me can hear. And that involves making different kinds of choices, but it's not like a compromise that I'm making. It's that something else interests me, something else is appealing to me.
To get people emotionally involved in something intellectual and political is important.
I want roles that challenge people to question where they are in life.
We were lounging around in this beautiful house in LA, and I'm coming from NY, so sometimes when we weren't working I would just sit on those folding chairs.
On a film, I was always acting. I was either changing my clothes really quickly and wiping off the lipstick and putting on the other lipstick and then working constantly, constantly.
I'm excited to be a part of this important project. Will and John are genuine heroes and I think their wives, Allison and Donna, are heroes, too. I feel privileged to be part of a project that will remember how we all came together on that day.
One of the things I think is really problematic about something like [government] spyware is that it isn't transparent - because of that anonymity and that secrecy, there aren't laws to regulate it.
We have our phones right by our beds, right next to us in our most exposed, vulnerable moments. And yet the government could have been collecting information from our phones at any moment. I think that basically as humans, we feel that's a violation.
If you're going to play a hooker in a movie, the movie has to have the perspective, of course, that it isn't such a great thing. Probably the only way to really play a hooker well is to believe you're doing something that's good. But at the same time, the movie can't have that point of view.
Sometimes I'll read things in the script and think, "That's not how humans behave," or "I don't understand how to do that role and make it seem like I'm not some kind of strange alien or on a sitcom." I don't get it, and when I feel that way, I have to listen to my instinct. My initial instinct does lead me in a direction that I can trust.